


the emperor

by relationshipcrimes



Series: heirs [2]
Category: Persona 5
Genre: Attempted Suicide, Character Study, Child Abuse, Eating Disorder Not Otherwise Specified, Gen, Mild Gore
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-18
Updated: 2020-03-18
Packaged: 2021-02-28 23:20:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,307
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23195413
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/relationshipcrimes/pseuds/relationshipcrimes
Summary: Excess is ugly. Ugliness is vice. Beauty is virtue. And Madarame’s heart is so, so ugly.Ugliness, as Yusuke has been well taught by Madarame himself, is a punishable sin.
Relationships: Kitagawa Yusuke & Madarame Ichiryusai
Series: heirs [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1667623
Comments: 28
Kudos: 197





	the emperor

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to vntagecassette for helping me unfuck the last part of this fic!!!
> 
> Please check the tags. Furthermore, if you have ever had an eating disorder of any stripe, I strongly encourage you not to read this fic.

Although they may be a form of art, Yusuke dislikes written works, and reads them only when he is too hungry to think of anything else. When his brain is shot and starved of glycogen, and his fingers are freezing with bad circulation and metabolism, and he is not yet brave enough to ask Madarame for a second serving of rice to stave off the brain fog and weather Madarame’s disapproving stare, Yusuke actually does the reading for classes that he’s supposed to be doing.

Of all the books Kosei and Madarame have made Yusuke read, there is only one written work that Yusuke actually likes: a story about an artist who loved a man so much that the artist drew his beloved in beautiful accuracy (as artists do), but upon seeing his own image, the beloved man was overcome with despair that he should ever lose this beauty, and so accidentally cursed himself to never age while the artist's portrait, instead, bore the weight of time, and grew ugly in the beloved's stead. That is to say, the portrait did not only reflect the ugliness of age, but the ugliness of the man’s soul; and as the man slowly descended into greater and greater sin (until at last he murdered the very painter who’d loved him enough to craft the portrait in the first place), the portrait reflected all of his unsightliness back at him. The portrait was hidden away in the man’s attic, because the man could not bear to see himself clearly.

Later, Yusuke's literature teacher told him that that's not _quite_ what happened in the story, and that perhaps he should reread it to check his comprehension, and that perhaps he has misinterpreted the relationship between the artist and the man. As if Yusuke has no eyes of his own, and cannot see without the guidance of his own teacher.

When he reread it, all he saw was the same, and more: a man with a beautiful face and nothing inside; an artist outwardly plain and full of love enough for entire worlds; a work of art slowly coming alive, gaining a soul where the original subject never had one, learning to understand itself, learning to understand its maker, its creator, the very heart that it held within its oils and canvas, and, at last, learning to stare back upon its maker.

Satisfied, Yusuke had closed the book, and knew, through the incessant howl of hunger in the back of his head, that he was right and the teacher was wrong. And he did not eat more than the rations Madarame gave him that day. And Madarame’s silence was approval enough. _The Portrait of Dorian Gray_ is the only romance novel Yusuke has ever loved, the first line of which is a truth to Yusuke as stable as the revolution of the earth: “ _The artist is the creator of beautiful things._ ”

**Thursday, May 26 th  
9 Days Remaining to the Change of Heart  
SAYURI**

Goemon comes to Yusuke on May 20th; by the end of the 26th, Yusuke is holding the original _Sayuri_ in his hands, standing on the doorstep of the only home he’s ever known. The street is growing dark. There are barely any streetlamps. He’s never questioned why that might be before, but now, as he examines the physical manifestation of his own teacher’s memory of Yusuke’s mother’s last work, it becomes increasingly difficult to see the _Sayuri_ as it truly is.

He is feeling like he is losing his sight, growing clouded and dark, unable to appraise the _Sayuri_ as the clean sheet of pure aesthetic beauty that it should be. Perhaps it is nothing to do with the streetlamps. It is something inside. Some taint through a clear, pure glass, ruining the light that filters through.

He’s memorized every inch of the _Sayuri_ through the highest-resolution images he could get his hands on, but there’s something about holding the actual work in your own hands. He is seeing where the colors didn’t quite line up when she filled in the outline. He is seeing the bumps and raises in the canvas, the imperfect product of mass-produced art material, no better than anything he could buy at a middle-grade craft shop. He is feeling how flimsy the paper is under his fingers; they hiss and crackle under the scratch of his nails, which have grown too long again; in the imperfections, in the experimentation, the freeform and the mistakes, he is seeing his mother fiddling with the lines, trying pencil here, pencil there, a splash of color where she feels it’s right. This is a canvas she spent no longer than a day on, and yet it remains the culmination of a lifetime of skill.

Yusuke is realizing he is a better technical artist at the age of seventeen than his own mother at the time of her death.

The brush strokes, the hint of pencil beneath the paint—these are the marks of an artist, having long since mastered technique, now finds herself unconcerned with it. This is a piece she did for herself, not for anyone else's approval; the equivalent of a professional ballerina dancing alone with no make-up, no costume, and no audience. This is the art beloved the world over? A woman’s doodle in her spare time? Or is this a form of art so far beyond what Yusuke knows that he is unable to recognize the brilliance in its nonchalance, its steadfast ignorance of standards or critique, concerned only with itself for what it is?

The internet images of the _Sayuri_ always made it seem like the _Sayuri_ was a perfect shape, like an equilateral triangle, printed upon the face of reality. A mathematical, untouchable creation. All the lines connected, the ink sewn into the world, the color of even tone and without flaws. Now he sees that this is paper, and the color is ink like everything else, and the lines of the woman’s fingers run over into the outline of the baby’s blanket. The images never told showed him that the _Sayuri_ was a work made with human hands.

He thinks, _This is the only original left, in all its simplicity and sincerity_. He thinks, _This is a copy made from Madarame's memory_. He thinks, _Madarame burned my mother's sketches like a student's ugly warm-up drawings._ He thinks, _Madarame burned my mother's masterpiece, and yet I am holding it because he remembered it down to its imperfections_.

Yusuke is squinting for nearly five minutes before he realizes that the light is fading. The little human touches of his mother’s work are growing dim. It will be bad for his eyesight if he continues to strain his vision so, and bad vision does not a good artist make, as Sensei says. In the half-dark, the _Sayuri_ looks a little more like what Yusuke thought it was supposed to look like.

Eventually, he covers it with its wrapping, and faces his own front door.

*

“I’m home,” Yusuke says.

The foyer, as it turns out, is darker than the streets. It lays in front of him with the straightforward lines of a theatre stage.

Yusuke does not often walk upright unless he is under public scrutiny to uphold Madarame’s reputation and pride as an artist. In his own home, without watching eyes, he does not often feel the need to keep up pretenses. Madarame did not and never did, except right up until the point that Yusuke found out everything about Madarame was a pretense, and was putting on an act for Yusuke’s eyes alone. Yusuke walks straight-backed now, slow and deliberate, his bag over one shoulder, the _Sayuri_ in his other hand. The floorboards creak like an old theatre stage under his socked feet. He doesn’t bother to turn the hallway lights on; it’s not like there’s any other students at the atelier anymore to leave stray art supplies along the floor.

He passes Madarame’s door, shut tight. He doesn’t stop. The _Sayuri_ , the root of Madarame's rotten heart, is in a flimsy canvas tarp in his hand. He walks right past, pushes open his own bedroom door, places the _Sayuri_ leaning against the wall, and shuts the door behind him. He listens, but nobody in the house stirs, and it's almost as if he's alone on a stage for two.

Like Yusuke does every other day, as if today is a normal day, he goes to the kitchen and opens the fridge. A bottle of water sits on the lowest shelf. There’s a few shoyu packets in a plastic cup. Half a stick of butter on the top shelf.

Yusuke pulls out his wallet to check if he has enough money for takeout. He still needs to buy paper tomorrow—they theoretically supply it at Kosei, but not the kind that Yusuke wants or needs. Sensei didn’t give him enough this week to get both. Not surprising, since they haven’t really spoken ever since the… incident in the locked room upstairs; but it’s also not unusual.

Maybe he should spent that money on real food, but he’s pretty sure that he needs to create art to live, whereas he probably won’t die without food.

Ah, wait. That should be the other way around, shouldn’t it?

He boils two cups of hot water in the kettle, standing as close to the stove as he dares get the cold out. It’s too cold for May. But it’s always cold in the atelier. And Yusuke has always had cold fingers. Bad circulation, they’d said when he went for his physical examinations at school. Something, something, it would improve if he ate more. When the water’s done, he puts an herbal tea bag in one and drinks the other plain just for the warmth. He sips the tea. He is still hungry when he finishes. He waits another ten minutes. He drinks another cup of hot water.

Sensei has trained him so well. A work of art in and of itself. There is no criticism, praise, or applause.

Eventually, Yusuke washes both cups out, cranking up the hot water handle to try and warm his fingers up. The water comes out cold anyway. Madarame’s door is still closed. If there’s no food in the fridge, maybe Madarame hasn’t eaten either—maybe it’s supposed to be one of those nights where Yusuke prods his teacher to rest, to stop fussing over the art show, to eat and drink and take care of himself. (Or maybe Madarame has a secret fridge full of food somewhere else, just like he has a whole secret house elsewhere with better lighting and better heating and better mattresses and—)

The water runs abruptly too hot. He snatches his still-cold, scalded fingers out from under the water, shoves the cup in the drying rack, and returns to his room. Shuts the door. In the dark corner of his room, the _Sayuri_ watches over the baby in her arms, paying no mind to the Yusuke in front of her.

*

Yusuke likes theatre. He likes most forms of art, though, so this is not a surprise. He has never participated, but he greatly enjoys watching the theatre being assembled during rehearsal—it’s like people-watching, but the people drift in and out of being themselves and being their roles, or being themselves and being the director, the stage manager, the light director, so on and so forth. Kosei has a robust theatre program and the auditorium is almost always in motion; it’s possible to sit for hours in the empty audience seats, watching the actors and directors and stage managers trace invisible lines—or sometimes put down real, physical lines with duct tape—across the stage, organizing bodies into space. He likes watching the set come up, organizing shapeless air into pockets, divisions where the audience’s vision falls naturally, where soon human actors will take their places and bring a fictional human, a practical lie, into life through their own body. Everyone knows their places. Bodies move between frames into other frames, lit up under lightings, made beautiful with the artificiality of rigged backgrounds and pre-programmed light cues to divide the actors’ skin into the right ratios of light and dark. He heard once that Kosei does not encourage method acting, or acting from the heart, or encouraging emotion. They encourage another line of acting thought, in which the body is thought to be a marionette, replicating life with such precision and accuracy that the audience cannot tell the difference. The wails of a bereaved mother onstage ring hollow in the actress’s heart, but her expression twists under the push and pull of so many individual strings that she is indistinguishable from the real thing. And just like that, feeling blooms in the audience’s chests. She is real and not real. Yusuke loves to watch, especially, the transition from rehearsal to performance: the lights go down, the curtain lifts, and real, breathing humans are split from the baggy, nonsensical real world into a picture frame, rendered two-dimensional, a moving portrait, suspended into place by a thousand cues and blocking decisions and a rigid script of one word after another, their tongues and arms and feet at the call of a grander vision of art, artificiality recreating reality better than reality ever could.

Sensei had no strong feelings on theatre as a medium, so eventually Yusuke stopped going.

**Friday, May 27 th  
8 Days Remaining to the Change of Heart  
FUNERALS**

Yusuke is having the distinct conviction that he dreamed about being bitten in half by Madarame’s shadow’s giant gold-plated mouth, but he cannot remember it. When it happened yesterday, the giant teeth clamped down hard until there was the crunch of ribs collapsing, and then ground together, large gold tombstones squashing Yusuke’s soft abdomen between them. Panther pulled him out easily with a Dia.

But in this dream that Yusuke cannot remember, he is sure that the teeth went clear through, split Yusuke open and crunched through his spine like a potato chip. Little segments of spine skittering out of the meat. All the organs unraveling like yarn, a child’s toybox stuffed overfull and scattering everywhere. Yusuke is assuming there must have been blood. Dripping down Madarame’s shadow’s mouth, perhaps. Yusuke’s severed legs jerking, then slumping awkwardly to the floor. Legs are such an odd invention, separated from the torso. Two long chopsticks welded together at the top. Ah—a clothespin. But what goes in between the clothespin? Legs cannot snap shut when it’s just his dress pants and white boots and intestines spilling from the top in round, soft bubbles. The clothespin was a bad metaphor. Words are bad as an artistic medium in general. Yusuke despises most written works unless it’s being spoken or sung.

Yusuke is not remembering this dream correctly. He is sure that if he had paper, he could recreate it. He could make it better than he dreamed, perhaps. He is due to produce something interesting sooner rather than later, and blood has not been a texture he has rendered yet onto canvas. It is having a viscosity to it that he is curious to see made onto paper.

He spends the entirety of morning homeroom plumping out the curve of the blood drops, the shine of the light on the organ surfaces. He is making the blood-drops so full and round he could hold it in his hands, cradle the circles in his palms. Then homeroom is ending, and his homeroom teacher is staring over his shoulder and asking him what this is, and Yusuke opens his mouth to say that it is additional practice work for Madarame-sensei (which is his usual excuse for when he’s been working on a piece to “gift” to Madarame for him to claim as his own), only to realize that if the change of heart goes through—if Madarame goes through with pursuing legal action against Akira and his friends—Yusuke will never paint anything for Madarame ever again. And now Yusuke is staring at this splattering of blood on the canvas dripping from gold-plated teeth, smeared wetly across a gold-plated tongue, of useless chopstick legs with no torso or body, unrecognizable as human any longer without its better half, and Madarame is not wanting this piece, and Yusuke is not wanting this piece either, and Yusuke is the only person left for Yusuke to make art for.

“Kitagawa-kun?” his homeroom teacher is asking, because she is used to Yusuke’s lapses in attention when he is deep in work. Yusuke blinks and starts. She is smiling indulgently, perhaps a little worriedly. “I said, what is this art for?”

*

Yusuke is not remembering this dream correctly. Where would Yusuke’s torso have gone if Madarame’s mouth had bitten him in half? Madarame’s Shadow had been a painting at the time. Would the painting have devoured him? Where does a body go to be digested if eaten by a painting? Why was Madarame’s cognition of Yusuke a painting, but Madarame’s cognition of his own Shadow in its most powerful form a painting as well?

If paintings were capable of doing such damage, of cutting people in half and eating the pieces, why would Yusuke’s cognition have done the same thing? Wasn’t Yusuke’s cognition a painting with hands, a body, a face, eyes, a mouth? Weren’t the paintings in Madarame’s palace connected, so that subjects and paintings could move between frames into other frames? Why wouldn’t Yusuke’s cognition have moved, at the very least?

Did Sensei think that Yusuke’s cognition _liked_ being in that frame?

*

ANN: Hey!! How's things

YUSUKE: Ah, hello.

YUSUKE: Aren’t we supposed to be in class?

ANN: Ugh... not you too

ANN: Wait before you cut me off

ANN: Do you not have akira’s number

YUSUKE: No, I have it. Why?

ANN: He says he hasn’t heard from u in a while and he’s worried!!!

YUSUKE: Ah. I might have missed a few of his texts.

ANN: Maybe you should answer him because he’s really motherhenning it right now

ANN: Mostly that just means he’s putting off big pissed off delinquent vibes and he’s scaring our teachers i think hahaha

ANN: But I’m serious!!! How’s things

YUSUKE: Madarame’s condition has not changed.

ANN: Hmm

ANN: I guess I figured as much…

ANN: I mean more how are YOU doing

ANN: Are you alright just hanging out in that house with Madarame??

YUSUKE: I’m fine.

YUSUKE: I actually find that it’s surprisingly tedious, being a Phantom Thief of Hearts.

ANN: Omg

ANN: Yeah tell me about it

ANN: The waiting is just as bad as it was last time

YUSUKE: With Kamoshida?

ANN: Yeah

ANN: I thought it would be easier because I’m not waiting for _his_ heart to change but

ANN: It’s kind of the same actually

ANN: Especially knowing that Madarame is going to take legal action against us...

YUSUKE: It could be said to be nervewracking, yes.

YUSUKE: It’s difficult to comprehend doing this sort of wait twice in a row.

ANN: Haha

ANN: Well Akira says that I should stop worrying even though he’s the one telling me to tell you to text him back

ANN: But also

ANN: I guess it’s marginally easier because I know it’ll be worth it

YUSUKE: Worth it?

ANN: Ummm

ANN: Well. With the way he treated you and everything I guess…

ANN: And with um… all the stuff with

ANN: the sayuri…

ANN: Geez um

ANN: Ok I guess I’ll just ask………… sorry if this is too forward but

ANN: Are you ok after learning all that stuff about your mom??

YUSUKE: Oh.

ANN: …Yusuke?

ANN: Are you still there??

ANN: Sorry I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable!!!

ANN: We can talk about something else or

ANN: Idk actually pay attention in class

ANN: Ugh!!! I just

ANN: Never mind

YUSUKE: ?

YUSUKE: Have I done something?

ANN: Uh

YUSUKE: Apologies. I’m not a frequent texter.

ANN: No worries

ANN: Ok second period’s up and the next teacher actually pays attention to what I do

ANN: Um… keep us posted!!!

ANN: Let us know if we can help

YUSUKE: That’s very kind of you. Thank you.

*

When Yusuke goes home, Madarame has not emerged from his room.

Yusuke knows this because nothing in the kitchen or the meagre sitting room has been moved—not even a spare teacup for Yusuke to clean up. Yusuke checks the rice cooker: Empty, unused. Yusuke checks the fridge: The same half stick of butter, the same shoyu packets. Yusuke checks the foyer again: Madarame’s shoes are still there.

Has Madarame been in his room, unmoving, all this time?

Is this how a change of heart goes? Is Madarame just going to be despondent in his room for the next week? Perhaps Ann was wrong. Perhaps the "change of heart" would not result with Sensei on his knees like Kamoshida, begging for those he wronged to believe his sincere apology. Perhaps, like Mona said, the "change of heart" removes the distorted desires, but there was nothing left of Madarame besides his greed and vanity, and in pulling out the root of his distortion, they've pulled out the entirety of Madarame's soul.

Yusuke taps his fingers along the flat rectangle of the table, digging his fingernails into the long fibers of the wood. Maybe that's the shape of Madarame's life: Devoid of any of his distorted desires, Sensei loses the desire for anything, and starves to death six feet from Yusuke's bedroom.

Has Madarame even _drank_ anything? Doesn’t the human body need water much more frequently than food?

Now Yusuke is standing outside of Madarame's door, which rests neatly in its frame, shut tight. Each beam of the doorframe neat in its edges, set solid and firm, squaring away the space in which Yusuke stands. Art is all in the framing. A human being can be a work of art if put on a pedestal. The Yusuke in Madarame's palace, made of oil and canvas, had been nearly indistinguishable from Yusuke if not for the materials he was made of and the frame that bordered him. The first time Yusuke had seen it, Yusuke felt covered in pain from the inside out; on the fourth time, Yusuke wondered why the recreation of his face was so detailed, so true to life. Like looking into a mirror made entirely of his Sensei's vision.

The cognition had looked very kind, in fact. Peaceful. Content with its fate. Sort of the way a corpse does, framed in its coffin box. Yusuke wonders if morticians and funeral directors spend much time posing the body, dressing up the face. He wonders if that could be considered a form of artistry in and of itself, manipulating the hearts of the bereaved to find peace upon seeing the slab of meat with its hair done and skin powdered lying in the open casket.

Yusuke raises his hand to knock on Madarame's door. The door in its frame still does not move. Stains of age and wood warp. Colors of distortion and time sets in its picture frame. It still looks real—it _is_ real—it is not real, because somewhere else, Madarame has entire other houses full of glitz and fancy wood. This door is not real. If Yusuke just leaned forward an inch more, he could feel it under his hands.

 _Starve, then_ , Yusuke is thinking in a flash of bitter fury, and snatches back his hand. He tucks his freezing fingers under his arms to get the cold out. Madarame was always extolling the virtues of eating sparingly, so as to better concentrate on their art. Madarame could suffer on his own medicine for once.

*

When Goemon had come to Yusuke, he’d been so furious that he thought he’d die. It’d come to him in a freezing cold, the sort that grows deep into your stomach, spikes your bones and burns from the inside out. He’d thought that when Goemon had finally wrenched himself from the bleeding hole where his face had been, that Goemon had pulled out all of Yusuke’s fury with him, and there would be nothing left on the inside: A pretty mask with empty space where Yusuke used to be, his insides now on the outside. He thought he’d never be angry ever again. He’d thought, _It isn't possible to pull so much anger out of myself and grow back more_. He’d thought, _One day, I will reach for my anger and find nothing there_. He’d thought, _One day, I be satisfied, and I will have had enough_.

*

Yusuke thought that funerals were a type of art ever since he attended the funeral of one of his fellow students. One of his siblings, it could have been said. He’d been six, and Akane had cried on him like he was a teddy bear the entire time, is really the thing that he remembers, so he’d been fairly pinned in place to her lap. The line between the funeral rituals and art were too thin to be divided. Yusuke, too, has a series of steps that he goes through when setting up his easel, when getting himself in the right frame of mind to produce; he knows the song and dance of setting up an art gallery, to frame everything just right so that the audience is appropriately contemplative upon seeing the installments, whether or not the installment is a 8x17 foot canvas or a huddle of scavenged junk in a plastic bag. He remembers thinking that the skin of the corpse must have been an interesting material to paint on. He does not remember what Madarame was doing at the time of the actual funeral. He remembers Madarame being extremely fastidious about the time they would arrive, giving them cues and lines to say if they were asked by the press or other funeral-goers, making sure to dress them in the right clothes, smoothing down stray shirt buttons and collars to put all the lines where they should be. He remembers Madarame looking Yusuke up and down before they went, judging and determining if Yusuke was equal to whatever Madarame had envisioned. He remembers Madarame smoothing his hair down. The palm of his hand had been dry and warm, as it always was, and gentle. Removing the imperfections and blemishes of unruly hair. Later, in other ways, Madarame would tell Yusuke what those blemishes were, and how to remove those parts of himself, and watch as Yusuke did it for him, willingly; Yusuke learned to find the beauty in the people that Madarame wanted him to use as his muse, to fix his own hair, to be as diligent and humble as Madarame needed. Nowadays, Yusuke supposes he knows that they were attending the funeral in the first place because Madarame had driven the student to suicide, but for some reason, the memory image of Madarame's hand smoothing his hair from his face remains unchanged.

*

Yusuke wonders what his mother looked like as she lay dying at Madarame’s feet.

Yusuke wonders what the student who committed suicide thought of as he died.

*

Yusuke was so certain he could not be this angry forever. 

*

He wants to know how long it took his mother to die. How long it took her to grow corpse-like and cold.

He wants to know how long Madarame watched Yusuke’s mother die.

He wants to know how long it took for her corpse to become beautiful enough to frame and rename as the _Sayuri_.

**Saturday, May 28 th  
7 Days Remaining to the Change of Heart  
FRAMES**

A picture frame divides between the piece of art and everything else. _In these days of contemporary art in which artists think they’re too good for the traditional methods_ , Madarame had warned Yusuke, _if you wish to go without a frame, it is necessary to have some other method of cutting away from your work that which is not art_.

*

When Yusuke was a child, he had a deadly fear of opening Sensei’s bedroom door.

To a child, everything’s larger than life. Doors are, quite literally, three times your height, and your parents may as well be gods. Doorknobs are mysteries. Rules are not explained. (Rules receive explanations when, say, Sensei tells you not to touch the stove, and you decide to do it anyway, and then the rule explains itself.) When Sensei said that his bedroom was a sacred space, never to be entered, with the harshest voice he ever used, Yusuke wound up with such a fear that he would not look at it until he was seven, would not go within a three foot radius of the thing until he was nine, and would not even touch the wood of the door until he was twelve.

Of course, when Yusuke was a teenager approximately two weeks ago, he had a deadly fear of opening Sensei’s locked door at the top of the stairs containing nearly a hundred copies of Sensei’s plagiarized _Sayuri_ clones right up until Ann pulled him through the door with brute force, so not much has changed regarding Yusuke and his fear of going anywhere near doors Sensei told him not to, evidently.

It was Madarame who got him out of his fear of approaching Sensei's door. Perhaps difficult to believe now that Yusuke has seen Madarame’s heart, but Madarame actually smiles quite a bit—not just outside where the press can see, but even at home, even when Madarame is criticizing Yusuke’s work. It’s a soft smile, the texture of well-worn leather. Madarame has laugh lines, actually. Madarame had patted his head and smiled encouragingly every time Yusuke stopped avoiding the door like it had the plague, and every time he did it, Yusuke would try a little harder.

Now it is morning and Sensei’s door is closed, which means that Sensei hasn’t risen yet. This is unlike him. He was always a preacher of early to rise, late to bed, paint paint paint paint in the hours between. Lunch and dinner breaks are necessary evils, to be executed with the precision of kabuki theatre. Taking care of one’s body a break one must deserve; good posture essential to the form and function of producing good art; god forbid Yusuke slouch in front of his easel. Yusuke is standing outside his bedroom door with his school bag packed and slung over his shoulder, and he is looking at the rising sunlight slanting through the doorway window in even streaks, the lines forming perfectly straight, slender rectangles up the length of Sensei’s door. The bars run straight down the length of the hallway at an angle, hit the base of Sensei’s door, then rise up, synchronized parallels, never intersecting, clean-cut as a printed ruler. Jail cell bars in beams of light.

Yusuke does wake Sense— _Madarame_. He does not wake Madarame. He turns on his heel and leaves. He steps all over the sunlight and ruins it in his wake.

*

Yusuke is staring at his blank canvas. His teachers are leaving him alone because they figure that Yusuke will come into a flash of inspiration sooner rather than later, because he always does. Yusuke is not trying to paint. He is trying to remember his mother, by painting.

He is trying to remember if she was kind. If she kept him on her lap when she painted. If she helped him with his first steps; if she smiled often; if she was quiet. He has few photographs of her, which he does not look at often. (The truth is that he doesn’t miss her very much, and has never felt like he has been in want of a parent.) He knows that she had long black hair, pale skin, so he opts for dark ink and paper white enough to hurt his eyes. She had very few facial features. The edges of her cheeks, her lips, her nose, all of it sanded over like a worn doll; he sands it even smoother, one unbroken ink-stroke separating her moon-face from the background around her. She was small, and did not carry herself with confidence or poise, but with a quiet dignity that came from someone stepped on too many times. Or perhaps the quiet dignity that she’d learned from Madarame’s exacting, precise standards of how an artist should behave. Yusuke lines the slope of her neck with a dedication to grace, in lieu of self-respect.

It looks like the _Sayuri_.

—Except that it's not _called_ the _Sayuri_ , because that's just a random name Madarame came up with. Yusuke's mother's name was not Sayuri. He has no idea what the original painting is called. He is never going to know what the painting is called, because it wasn't supposed to have a name. In fact, the only painting of the three of these—of the modified _Sayuri_ , the "real" _Sayuri_ with the child included, and whatever this thing Yusuke just painted—only Madarame's modified _Sayuri_ will ever have a name to be recognized by.

But did his mother _want_ recognition? Was that the point of her piece? Had she ever wanted fame and achievement, or had she just wanted to make art—like how Madarame always told Yusuke to ignore the crowds, the critics, the fans, and just focus only on the love of the painting—?

And here Yusuke dredged up her image from beyond the grave not for the sake of good art, but just because he can't stop picking at this like a scab—

Without thinking, he dumps a splash of red across the face. His mother's face dissolves in a mask of blood.

Ruined instantly. How easy.

A teacher comes by and compliments the boldness of the black lines contrasted against the dark reds. When Yusuke tells him that red just happened to be the color closest to his hand, his teacher laughs, like Yusuke had told a good joke, that it is truly so unbelievable that Yusuke might ever do something not in the pursuit of creating Madarame’s beautiful art.

*

It is too easy for someone like Yusuke to make "art." None of the teachers push him anymore. Yusuke is used to the relentless praise and pressure of Madarame’s endless requirements, upcoming deadlines, constant supervision. Kosei teachers all assume that because he's Yusuke Kitagawa, and because he's Madarame's student, whatever he makes will be _art_ , somehow, someway. Even if now it is no longer for Madarame. Even if now it is no longer made according to Madarame's tastes.

With the woman’s soft eyes ruined, Yusuke thinks he sees the woman’s lips curl cruelly. Under her red mask of paint, she could very well be staring right back at him.

*

At lunch, it is finally occurring to Yusuke, staring down at his convenience store lunch, that Madarame might _actually_ just starve or dehydrate to death in the middle of his change of heart. As in, he'd thought about it in a fit of anger, but Yusuke might actually be right.

Then everything they’ll have done would have been for nothing. Madarame would never admit to his crimes. Never bring Yusuke’s mother the recognition she deserves. Never admit with his own mouth what he’s done, for all of Madarame’s past pupils (those still living) to hear.

Yusuke is thinking about how _tacky_ Madarame’s heart was. It offended the sensibilities, wallowing in excess, in its own self-congratulatory noise. It loved money and fame and achievement and everything, anything excess. Excess is ugly. Ugliness is vice. Beauty is virtue. Sensei's heart was so _ugly_.

Ugliness, as Yusuke has been well taught by Madarame himself, is a punishable sin.

*

When Yusuke gets back home, it is all the same: quiet, empty, untouched. Yusuke is standing in front of Madarame’s door once again, hand up to knock. This time, he does.

There is no response.

“Sensei?” Yusuke asks.

“Yusuke?” comes Madarame’s voice. It sounds weak. It sounds gentle.

It sounds exactly like how Madarame _should_ sound, were Madarame really Yusuke’s perfect, virtuous, wonderful teacher.

“Are you alright?” asks Yusuke.

There’s a silence.

“Sensei, I’m coming in.”

Horrifically rude. Yusuke would never have done that before they’d stolen Madarame’s treasure. Unfortunately, Yusuke is the new master of this atelier, so he opens the door without waiting for a response. Madarame is propped blearily up against his single pillow in his sparse room, containing nothing but his futon, a shallow closet full of plain robes, a sitting table, a wooden bucket, and a chest of drawers no higher than Yusuke’s knees.

Madarame’s eyes don’t track Yusuke’s movements. They stay glassy, fixed mostly towards the light shining through his window, like an animal tracking a lightbulb. Yusuke kneels at the side of his futon.

There’s a rank smell in the air. Part of that, Yusuke knows, is probably because of the contents of the bucket—fascinating that Madarame is so despondent that he can barely only get out of bed to piss in a bucket like a prisoner. Madarame’s hair is oily and unwashed. He looks no better than a vegetable in a hospital bed.

Perhaps Yusuke should have expected Madarame to be in such a state, considering that the Thieves had just gotten through with lobotomizing half of his head.

“Yusuke?” Madarame says again, like he can’t see Yusuke not five feet away.

A soft and frail old man. Something in Yusuke’s heart fractures uncleanly. There it is again—that sense from back when he was examining Sayuri under the electric streetlamps, of being unable to see Madarame as he is, as if some part of Yusuke is now tainted glass.

“I’m here,” says Yusuke gently. He dabs sweat away from Madarame’s forehead with a napkin. Madarame isn’t coming down with a fever, but he’s lying there in the sun in the middle of a warm, late spring day under a futon. “I brought some water. Are you thirsty?”

Maybe the weakness in Madarame’s body has something more to do with the fact that Madarame hasn’t drank water in four days, then. “Thank you, Yusuke,” says Madarame, instead of nodding his head, so Yusuke uncaps the bottled water and holds it out. Madarame doesn’t move. Eventually, Yusuke pushes Madarame’s head upright so that he can allow Madarame to take gentle sips; no matter how thirsty Madarame might be, it seems, Madarame’s current changing-of-heart still renders him largely unresponsive.

“Thank you,” says Madarame again when nearly half the bottle is gone. His voice somehow sounds raspier. “Such a dedicated… student…”

Is this the change of heart? Has it finally gone through? Or is this just yet another one of Madarame’s lies, that he spouts on near reflex in his constant pretense at being an artist with any virtue?

“Here,” says Yusuke, pulling open his backpack. “It’s just packaged bread from school.” Leftovers from Yusuke’s convenience store lunch. He hadn’t really bought enough for himself in the first place, and this will be all that Madarame’s had in days.

Madarame sits up slowly, with surprising steadiness. He’s not physically weak, per se; it must be the effect of losing his treasure that’s made him so listless. He eats at a pace that tries even Yusuke’s patience. The sensation of sitting through a child’s picky eating returns. Or maybe this is the sensation of watching his mother's murderer eat Yusuke's lunch leftovers.

Nearly thirty minutes later, all the food is gone. About the equivalent of two snacks, at best. Yusuke is struggling to remember how many days it’s been since Madarame ate a real meal—two days? Three? Is it even safe for Madarame to eat this sort of food after doing nothing but staring at the ceiling for so long?

“Thank you, Yusuke,” says Madarame again, hollowly.

“Of course, Sensei,” Yusuke replies.

Madarame goes back to breathing shallowly, staring up at the ceiling. The picture of virtuous suffering, the kindly teacher ill in his bed, tended to by his dedicated student. All the bodies in their places. Freeze, cut, and frame.

If Madarame is still hungry, he does not request more food. Yusuke does not give it.

**Sunday, May 29 th  
6 Days Remaining to the Change of Heart  
BODIES**

According to Christianity, Sunday is the day of rest. The seventh day after six long days of work, theoretically. True artists, Madarame would say, did not subscribe to such breaks in their routine. The artist’s way was habitual, daily commitments to the same routine, day after day after day, for the love of their craft.

On the Sunday after they steal Madarame’s treasure, Yusuke is already working at six in the morning, and he is wondering if he really cares about being recognized for his own artwork.

Today he is doing an anatomy study of a woman from an online 3D reference. No clothes. Also no skin. Yusuke likes the idea that the human body is just a very hard puppet that is pulled into various shapes by a series of bloody, meaty ropes called muscles.

He draws the 3D model upside down, side to side, bending over, twisting, showing the soft space between her ribs and her pelvis, crushed into a crouch by her back muscles and legs. He starts to draw in-between pictures, connecting different poses with transitional poses, as if he has photographed her moving from one pose to the next in a time lapse. He makes her muscles push her into every pose he likes. He wonders if he’d have let Madarame steal his work for years and years and years, until Madarame’s collection was full of nothing but Yusuke’s works, only Yusuke’s portfolio in a thinly-veiled disguise of Madarame’s name. Madarame would get all the money for it, of course, but Yusuke wouldn’t die of starvation. Probably. Possibly. (Probably.) No—he wouldn't have. No more than Madarame could have ever been content to live his life as a mediocre, unpaid artist. (So maybe Yusuke should have just kept his head down and accepted his due with humility and—)

Yusuke’s hands are cold again. He blows on them furiously, thinking murderously of the hot water Yusuke used to keep his hunger chills away, the degree temperature required to scald skin from bone. Thinking about how meat cuts cleaner when it’s frozen through.

He leans back in his chair. Taps his pencil along his face at the speed of a hummingbird’s wings. Realizes two minutes later he’s been drilling the graphite end into his cheek instead of the eraser.

He starts to draw her thinner.

This one takes imagination. She’s not wearing any clothes. She’s not wearing any skin. There’s a hundred and one models of skinny women on the internet, some skinny enough to see the bones, but getting a good model of a woman wasted by starvation without any skin to cover the muscle wastage is—well, it’s impossible, unless Yusuke wants to look up a snuff film. He fudges it. Artistic license and all that. He tries to imagine, if he were God, and he were making this bone marionette pulled into different shapes by a series of bloody meat-ropes, what would it look like if it hadn’t had enough meat to make enough ropes?

After an hour, it looks hideous. It barely looks human. It seems that the real human body knows itself better than Yusuke can imagine it. He throws it away. _Madarame never actually put any stock in asceticism to make better art_ , he thinks as the paper hits the back of the wastebasket.

All those times Yusuke went hungry, and it was for nothing. All those times Yusuke shivered under his blanket because Madarame wouldn’t turn the heating up, for nothing. All those times Yusuke cried for hours and hours when another student left, for _nothing_. Yusuke had lived on rice and beans and meagre vegetables for _nothing_. Given away all his money to Madarame to learn the virtues of poverty for _nothing_. Drowned in paints and papers and paintbrushes he couldn’t eat for nothing, lived without a laptop for nothing, consigned himself to this rickety shack, allowed Madarame to take the lock off his door, to turn away friends and friendship, to speak to no one and spurn school lunches in favor of whatever Madarame had given him that day, to wake up at sunrise every day when he was exhausted and shaking and bitter and for nothing, for nothing, because Madarame was a hypocrite and a liar and a swindler, a pretty picture of an “artist” with nothing inside—

 _—who wasn't wrong about everything_ , Yusuke is thinking. He turns back to his original series: the woman flayed raw, now upside down after he’d shuffled his papers. The hanged woman curls into herself from where her feet grow from from the ceiling, her back exposed even as she hides herself away. _There is beauty and virtue in asceticism still_.

Madarame just hasn’t learned the beauty in starving.

*

ANN: Hey!!

ANN: We haven’t heard from you in a while

ANN: Is everything ok??

YUSUKE: Yes. Thank you for asking.

ANN: Akira said he hasn’t heard from you in a while

YUSUKE: I forgot.

ANN: He said he texted u?

YUSUKE: I must have missed it.

YUSUKE: Is there an emergency?

ANN: No I think he’s just looking out for you

ANN: And because this is only our second time doing this haha

ANN: I feel like we’ve had this conversation before…

ANN: I guess we’re all really nervous about what’s going to happen??

ANN: I really don’t want anything to go wrong

YUSUKE: Like what?

ANN: Oh

ANN: Well

ANN: Morgana mentions sometimes that there’s a risk of the person dying…

ANN: Not to say that your teacher’s going to die!!!

ANN: We definitely did everything the right way so that he should have a change of heart

ANN: Ah maybe I shouldn’t have said anything…

YUSUKE: No, I knew that there was a chance that he could die.

YUSUKE: I discussed the probability with Morgana and Akira.

YUSUKE: One change of heart with Kamoshida does not guarantee that another will happen precisely the same way.

ANN: Wow Akira covered all bases huh

ANN: Well I’m glad you know!!

ANN: But also I don’t think you have to worry about it haha

YUSUKE: Ann, may I ask a question?

ANN: Sure!! Anything

ANN: Seriously anything haha

ANN: We’re all part of the same thieves group now so I’ve got your back

YUSUKE: Oh… thank you.

YUSUKE: I wanted to ask—how would he have died, if we’d decided to go that route?

ANN: Hmmm

ANN: You’ll have to ask Morgana yourself but I think it has something to do with the shadow

ANN: Like stealing the treasure but leaving the shadow to just dissolve has something to do with it

ANN: So I guess if we were going to kill Madarame we would have just. uh. shot his shadow…

ANN: But that wouldn’t have killed him

ANN: It would have just caused a mental shutdown I think

ANN: Which is kind of the same thing as him being dead but he would have been still breathing technically?

ANN: At least I’m pretty sure that’s how it works

ANN: I was definitely going to kill Kamoshida’s shadow for a second there and I talked it over with Mona and he said that if I’d shot him, that probably would have caused a mental shutdown in Kamoshida

YUSUKE: Why didn’t you?

ANN: What?

YUSUKE: Shoot and kill Kamoshida’s shadow.

ANN: Oh

YUSUKE: Apologies if it’s a forward question.

YUSUKE: Please don’t feel an obligation to answer.

YUSUKE: Although we've gone through Madarame's palace together, I understand that we haven't known each other very long.

ANN: It’s just not very… good

ANN: Uhhh

YUSUKE: Again, I understand it’s a personal subject.

ANN: No I just… don’t want you to think any less of me I guess haha

ANN: He’s going to suffer for the rest of his life because of his guilty conscience

ANN: He’s going to be branded as a sex offender for the rest of his life

ANN: He’s never going to be able to work again when he gets out of jail

ANN: He’s always going to know exactly what he did to us

ANN: I wanted that.

ANN: I don’t really um… I guess care about other people knowing what he did, or justice, or revenge or… I guess any of the traditional ways of making sure that things are set right

ANN: Geez

ANN: Now that I think about it

ANN: I don’t even think about what Shiho might want

ANN: Maybe Shiho would have wanted me to kill him...

ANN: But I just asked myself

ANN: What do _I_ want?

ANN: And I wanted him to suffer.

YUSUKE: I see.

ANN: Haha

ANN: It was pretty selfish

ANN: I think, if I weren’t so selfish, I’d have just let him kill himself

ANN: He offered that

ANN: I don’t know if Akira told you but he asked us to let him kill himself as penitence…

ANN: And I think maybe Shiho would have wanted that too?

ANN: What goes around comes around

ANN: And then at least we wouldn’t have to put up with him anymore if he killed himself

ANN: But I’m not exactly a paragon of virtue, just thinking of only what _I_ wanted in that moment

ANN: And if he killed himself, that’s only a second of misery

ANN: Just a suicide would never compare to the rest of his life

YUSUKE: Oh. I see.

ANN: That’s not very good of me, is it

YUSUKE: Hmm.

YUSUKE: On the contrary,

YUSUKE: I think it’s quite beautiful.

ANN: Omg

ANN: Um wow

ANN: Really??

ANN: What are those Kosei teachers teaching you about art and beauty at Kosei………………………

YUSUKE: ?

YUSUKE: I didn’t learn about art from Kosei, Ann.

*

That night, Yusuke makes dinner for two. He sneaks into Madarame's room, filches some yen from his dresser, buys a fresh package of rice and some vegetables, puts the vegetables in the fridge, sketches this and that while the rice cooks.

Madarame did not eat breakfast today, either. Six days until Madarame supposedly calls his legal team and destroys Yusuke’s life. Insofar as Yusuke knows, the human body can survive without food for thirty days. But the human body can only survive without water for four.

These estimates don’t really apply. Hunger as Yusuke knows it isn’t just _not eating_. Hunger is eating not quite enough, eating scraps here and there without ever really being _not_ hungry, consistently, every day, until days become weeks and weeks become months. Strung out in slow motion, shrinking, so that the starvation sets in too slowly to notice. In irony of all ironies, you have to eat to starve.

When the rice is done, he puts it in a bowl, enough to be called a filling meal (if Madarame hadn’t skipped both breakfast and lunch), pairs it with a small bouquet of vegetables, pairs it with a light sauce. He takes it to Madarame, who eats it without complaint or protest. Madarame is so thankful for his dedicated student. Yusuke, ever loyal, is so happy to be here for his teacher in his time of need. The bowl, really no bigger than Yusuke’s palms put together, is scraped clean, but Madarame still does not ask for more.

*

If Madarame doesn’t yet know the beauty and aesthetics of starving, maybe Madarame should start learning.

**Monday, May 30 th  
5 Days Remaining to the Change of Heart  
EYES**

Thirty days without food; four days without water. The human body can only survive about three minutes without air. So that answers Yusuke’s questions on how long Madarame watched his mother die.

*

“Art is a matter of seeing,” says his first period teacher. (Yusuke is not able to remember which one. Not a teacher who makes him stop sketching in class, so it doesn’t matter.) The teacher goes on: “Seeing, of course, it not a passive action. The gaze does its own work, by nature of the fact that human beings are not clear, unmarred filters. For example, the gaze is hardly a clean window. Art gets caught on the blemishes of the human as it makes its way through. As such, the gaze tears through art, practically destroys art’s natural form with judgment. At its best, the gaze is a method of conquer. At its worst—well, perhaps not quite ‘at its worst.’ Perhaps, also at its best, the gaze is an accusation.”

*

Yusuke goes back from school on his lunch break to make sure that Madarame hasn't died since the morning, like he's looking after a toddler. He tells his teachers that it's for Madarame's art show, so that his teachers know he'll be back late. One of them congratulates him on his flourishing art career. Another congratulates him on his diligence and loyalty to his teacher.

Madarame’s lunch is an apple, sliced into pieces by Yusuke’s own hand, and a cup of strong tea. Yusuke wonders if Madarame looks paler and smaller already. The tea is warm against Yusuke’s freezing hands.

*

When Madarame’s heart changes, its impurity and ugliness will have been rid from the world.

Yusuke is wondering if that’s all there is to art—the absence of ugliness. No, he’s not wondering; he knows that’s not true; art is creation, and imposition of one’s will upon the disorganized noise into a better vision. To get _rid_ of ugliness is not enough. It must be _remade_. It was Madarame who taught him that, when Madarame taught him how to create for Madarame’s coin.

**Tuesday, May 31 st  
4 Days Remaining to the Change of Heart  
ART**

When Ann texts him to ask how he’s doing, Yusuke tells them that he’s doing just fine. And he’s not lying. He means it, oddly.

Yusuke cleans out Madarame’s bucket and gives Madarame more water the next day. Madarame is so peaceful in his room, the very picture of an old man in a well-deserved retirement. An artist enjoying the remainders of his long, long life. As serene and gentle as Yusuke always imagined him to be, as Madarame always promised he would be.

“I’m leaving for school, Sensei,” Yusuke tells Madarame before he leaves that morning. Madarame only breathes shallowly. “I’ll see you at lunch today.” Madarame does not reply.

*

“Did you draw that, Kitagawa-kun?” asks some girl that Yusuke cannot remember the name of. They’ve been together in the same painting classes for several years. She’s never painted anything remarkable.

“Ah,” says Yusuke, and for a long moment, thinks about whether or not he painted it or not. Truthfully, obviously, yes, he did. For many of the past years, however, if he was painting something particularly good, then no, he did not, he was replicating one of Madarame’s works, because the piece would soon be showing in one of Madarame’s art galleries. By the time he remembers he doesn’t have to have this debate anymore, a few of the girl’s friends are whispering behind her. She doesn’t go away and doesn’t whisper back. “Yes, I did paint this,” says Yusuke.

“It’s wonderful,” says the girl. “I really adore the lighting.”

Yusuke’s heart is swelling with pride, like a hideous cancer. Pride in one’s work is one of the vices that lead to corruption of pure artistry, Madarame used to say. “It’s nothing. Doesn’t everyone know how to do that?”

The girl shakes her head. Yusuke is beginning to wonder if he should be remembering her name. “Well, I do know, but I’m not any good at it on such a massive scale. Perhaps you’re a natural,” says the girl without a name. “Will you finish the piece? Or will you title it as it is?”

“Ah, no.”

“I suppose untitled works are fashionable nowadays, aren’t they?” says the girl without a name. Yusuke hadn’t meant it that way. He meant he wasn’t going to finish this one, like he wasn’t going to finish thousands of other pieces of work that he’d begun just to pass the time. “Will you submit it to a gallery? There’s a call for artists on the first floor lounge right now. You just need to send it in with your name. There’s very little pay, but the recognition counts for something.”

His hungry heart is spinning him a tale of rewards: People passing his work in a gallery, seeing _his_ name and not Madarame’s under the label, congratulating _him_ for his achievements—“No,” says Yusuke sharply. “I won’t submit this one anywhere under my name, thank you.”

The girl without a name nods sagely. “Anonymous works are quite trendy nowadays, too,” she says. “You’re truly a natural, Kitagawa-kun. Is there anything for the teachers to really teach you?”

*

Madarame is groaning when Yusuke comes home that day. Panting as if in a fever. Yusuke can’t relate; Yusuke’s been cold for days. Ever the dutiful student, Yusuke sits by his side, gives him more water to sip. He helps Madarame change into a fresh shirt, like Madarame is a patient in a retirement home. The very image of loyalty and dedication; two roles of teacher and student, reciting scripted blocking of tenderness and care. “What day is it?” Madarame asks vaguely.

“You should rest,” says Yusuke.

“Yusuke? The art show? The…” Madarame’s eyes dart back and forth. The whites of his eyes are greyer than they were yesterday. “The _Sayuri_ …?”

“You’re imagining things, Sensei,” says Yusuke. Today he’s made steamed egg to go with the rice, in two portions identical in size, small enough that Yusuke’s stomach hurts just to look at it. “It’s time for dinner.”

**Wednesday, June 1 st  
3 Days Remaining to the Change of Heart  
SUBJECTS**

“The definition of beauty is not merely in the eye of the beholder,” says Ms Ito, “but beauty has varied from society to society, era to era, country to country, even dependent upon subpopulations such as upper and lower classes, subcultures, so on and so forth.” She places a packet directly on top of Yusuke’s latest notebook doodle. _Beauty standards of Joseon, Confucianism, and Modern South Korea_ , says the top page. Ms Ito goes on: “We might even say that beauty is defined by the collective. When was Korea annexed by Japan? Kageyama-kun.”

“1910.”

“Until?”

“The end of World War II.”

“The year?”

“1945.”

“Would anyone like to guess a rough percentage of how much of Japan’s culture was influenced by Korean art?”

Silence from Kageyama.

“Anyone can answer,” says Ms Ito. No response. “Or how much Korean art was influenced by Japan?”

More silence.

“Kitagawa-kun, please refrain from creating masterpieces in the margins of your notes until designated studio time,” Ms Ito says suddenly. “The doodles you love to draw in my class came from somewhere, and in my class, you’re expected to learn about it. Your talent came from somewhere, too. Objective beauty—” Ms Ito, finally fed up, pulls Yusuke’s pencil right out of his hand “—does not exist. It must be made, and then enforced.”

Ms Ito is the only teacher at Kosei who is unimpressed with Yusuke’s scholarship, artistic portfolio, his skill, or his teacher. This is because Ms Ito is always going on about the history of art and its evolutions. Perhaps to Ms Ito, Yusuke is just one very small recent chain in a long, long list of artists stretching back as early as man could breathe. Yusuke cannot say that it isn’t irritating to have his focus broken.

“Beauty does not exist purely within the human heart,” she goes on. “It is made, or, considering the rate at which sheer novelty is considered beautiful or at least _profitable_ , beauty can be said to exist only within the relationship between two things. Beauty can be made as a reaction to a war that just ended, or an economic depression, or a period of bounty, or a period of colonization. Beauty is often determined by what is scarce, and therefore what is rare. Beauty is an _interaction_. A human heart in isolation can never attain beauty. As such, art in isolation, without human actors to determine whether or not it speaks to them and their society, is neither beautiful nor unbeautiful. It simply is.”

She surveys them. Nobody speaks.

“Aesthetic taste must be trained into a person,” she says. “It doesn’t happen naturally. It’s acquired, like coffee. Here at Kosei, we train you to have a particular type of aesthetic taste—yes, even though teachers will say that they’re encouraging you to explore your own styles. Us teachers nevertheless reward and ignore the types of art that we think are good or bad. We are always in the process of training you towards a type of art style. But whether or not it’s right or wrong, I can’t say. It’s just one type. Art comes in many forms. Your teachers will tell you certain aesthetics are no good and others are desirable even as they try to accept all your artistic endeavors. And they got their taste from somewhere, too, and had the ‘bad’ tastes pruned or punished out of them, once upon a time, by their own teachers. Even the very art that you find beautiful—that’s probably because of what someone taught you. The very art that you find disgusting—that’s because your love for it was beaten out of you, so that teachers could mold you like you yourself are a work of art. Is that understood, Kitagawa-kun?”

“Yes, Sensei,” says Yusuke. He is still examining a particular end of a pencil mark that he needs to make darker.

“Repeat to me what I just said.”

Yusuke thinks about it. “I wasn’t listening,” he says truthfully.

Ms Ito puts her face in her hand. Several other students giggle. “Never mind,” she says. “Just don’t draw in my class anymore.”

“Yes, Sensei.”

“I mean it, Kitagawa-kun.”

“Of course, Sensei.”

She puts her own copy of the packet on the teacher’s podium. “Turn to page five first,” she says, and turns her back on the class to pick up a piece of chalk. Immediately, Yusuke pulls out a new drawing pencil and a fresh sheet of scratch paper.

*

ANN: Yusuke??

ANN: Any updates on Madarame??

ANN: Sorry to keep bugging you :\

ANN: I know it must be really stressful

ANN: But the deadline is really close so ummm

ANN: Yeah

ANN: We should’ve offered earlier but if you need any help with being around Madarame right now…!!

YUSUKE: Thank you, Ann.

YUSUKE: You’ve been too kind to me.

ANN: Not at all!!

ANN: We’re Phantom Thieves now together, so

ANN: We’re all on the same team!!

ANN: And

ANN: I guess I was also thinking

ANN: We really got off to a bad start……

YUSUKE: ?

ANN: I guess I’m hoping that we can put it behind us??

YUSUKE: Oh.

YUSUKE: I’ve been thinking lately.

YUSUKE: It _was_ rather rude of me to paint you the way that I did, wasn’t it?

ANN: Haha………

ANN: Well it was definitely really fast, that’s for sure

YUSUKE: I didn’t know you at all.

ANN: Hahahahaaaaaa you sure didn’t………

ANN: That sure was a thing that happened………

YUSUKE: We’d never even spoken before, but I thought,

YUSUKE: “Someone that beautiful must reveal something incredible about the world to whoever looks at her.”

ANN: Oh

ANN: Um

ANN: Thanks…??

YUSUKE: There’s a line of thought that people who are beautiful are conduits to truth and goodness.

YUSUKE: Or maybe that beauty is truth and goodness, because those sorts of things do not require explanation.

YUSUKE: You simply know justice when you see it.

ANN: Wow

ANN: That sounds kind of dumb actually

ANN: Oh!!! Uhhhhh

ANN: Sorry if you think that

ANN: I didn’t mean to uhhh imply that what you thought was dumb!!!!

YUSUKE: No, it’s just something that’s been said by philosophers here and there.

YUSUKE: I don’t actually think that.

ANN: Oh thank god

ANN: Ok I take it back that sounds really stupid

ANN: People who’re beautiful are just beautiful, geez

ANN: People make such a big deal out of it……

ANN: Like pretty people cease to be people and they’re just cute things to ogle at

YUSUKE: Don’t you model for magazines?

ANN: Yeah

ANN: It’s really fun too

ANN: But once I saw a guy staring at my photo in a magazine like I was a piece of meat

ANN: Like!!!!

ANN: I wanted to crawl out of that photo and strangle him haha

ANN: Like. Hey!!!! I’m right here, actually!!!!!

ANN: I’m a real person, you know!!!!!

ANN: I’m alive like everyone else!!!!

YUSUKE: Thanks for looking out for me this week, Ann.

ANN: No problem!!!

ANN: Umm

ANN: Thanks for listening to me ramble about my modeling too haha

ANN: It feels good to talk about it actually........... I guess it was bothering me for a while and I didn't realize??

YUSUKE: I'm glad I could help even in such a small way.

ANN: You did!!!

ANN: Let us know if anything happens with Madarame or if you want any of us to come over!!

ANN: 😊😊😊

**Thursday, June 2 nd  
2 Days Remaining to the Change of Heart  
YUSUKE**

Madarame has barely eaten in seven days.

As it turns out, neither has Yusuke.

*

On this day, before school, Yusuke wakes up early from hunger.

Yusuke does not experience hunger like a normal person. When he ignores his stomach, it stops rumbling. When he ignores the urge to snack, he stops feeling it. But when he goes too long without eating, he gets cold, and foggy, and his brain becomes slow, and real life moves past him as if in mildly-slow motion. He can’t stand to listen to fast-paced music, or anything with words. Life becomes slightly unreal. He has the sudden urge to paint still life studies of food—the more sugary, the more rich, the better.

On this morning, he wakes up having vividly dreamed that he had sat across from his cognitive self, the boy in the painting, and the cognitive Yusuke had watched the real Yusuke slowly demolish a meal meant for six or seven. All of the food had been arrayed in swatches of color and shapes like the best impressionist art, and for that reason Yusuke cannot remember anything that he ate. His entire body is shuddering. The cold is inside of him. He cannot get it out. He’s been living on convenience store snacks again.

Slowly, Yusuke gets out of bed. He puts on as many layers as he can, early in the month of June, when it’s ostensibly hot as all hell. He has no idea if the atelier is retaining too much heat under the new summer sun, or if it’s cool in the shade.

He drags himself past the _Sayuri_ , who ignores him in favor of her painted son. Madarame’s door slides past him. He ignores the first-floor kitchen. He goes, instead, up the stairs, one hand on the railing like an old man, and pulls himself up to the door that had been locked all his life. The one with the _Sayuri_ counterfeits on the other side.

It’s locked again. Yusuke doesn’t have the key. He rattles it for good measure, and then leans his head against the wood. He slides down. Leans his back against the wood. It’s hard against his spine. He leans his head back against the door, long neck open and exposed, staring at the home he’s lived in his whole life from behind the thin film of a cold hunger he can’t get out, sitting neatly within the shape of the locked door he still cannot open.

*

He is dreaming that while he is lying there against the door, inside the room isn’t a series of _Sayuri_ counterfeits, but a series of cognitive Yusukes, lining every foot of the walls, crawling up the ceiling, every single one of them looking back at Yusuke. They are all dead. Neat, with their hair brushed to the side, the way Madarame likes it. Wasted, shriveled, eyes hollowed out, lips blue with cold. No more art left in them. Organized and ready in their coffins.

They push their painted fingers against their frames, up and out of the canvas. They peel themselves from two dimensions to three. One of them gets his arm free and pulls another out by his shirt collar. There are too many bodies for the tiny space; the Yusukes squirm and crawl on top of each other, pushing each other down, crawling on their hands and knees, until they can beat their hands against the locked door in wet splatters. They rattle the door. They shake the ground. They tear their frames, break their canvases, kick in the lock, tear the shelves from the walls, until the very room itself begins to split, the house itself begins to sway and creak, threatening to come apart, the door jumps and splinters in its frame, and Yusuke knows _exactly_ what they want: They’re going to flood down the stairs in a wave of painted limbs, drag Madarame from his bed, carry him back up the stairs. They’ll pin him to the canvas with bolts. Smother him in canvas. Pour the oil acrylics down his throat, paint him from the inside; peel the skin away, recolor the blood in purples and royal blues, pump pigments into his veins. Four days to die of dehydration. Three minutes to die of air deprivation. They can make it faster with blood loss. Soon, Madarame, too, can be beautiful: Just like Yusuke, just like the students Madarame drove to suicide, just like the starving puppet woman, just like the _Sayuri_ , like Yusuke’s mother. A kind, caring, selfless teacher, just like Madarame said he was. The cognitive Yusukes are banging against the door hard, now, trying to shake Yusuke loose, get him out of the way and crush the door under their hands. Why won’t he move? They are all artists, and he understands, doesn’t he? Was that not what Madarame made of Yusuke? A creature who makes beautiful things? They’ll find him the day after his change of heart, locked in his room full of counterfeits, a written confession clutched in his hand. The autopsy will rule his death by dehydration; the police will concur it was a suicide of guilt, that Madarame locked himself in this room full of his greatest shames until he died of water loss, if only Yusuke would just get out of the way and let them open the door and—

—and Yusuke hits the ground with a jolt.

He’d slid to the side while he was asleep. He pushes himself back up and squints at the locked room. Now he’s sprawled ungainly across the top of the stairs. No poise in his pose, no beauty in it at all. No symmetry or rule of three. He’s half in the doorframe and half out.

The locked door is silent.

*

Yusuke eats a breakfast of plain white rice. He can’t stomach anything else. He feels nauseous five bites in, and instead of letting Madarame have the rest, throws the leftovers down the drain. He thinks about drinking hot water to stay warm, and stares at the kitchen sink until he stops shaking.

**Friday, June 3 rd  
1 Day Remaining to the Change of Heart  
MADARAME**

Yusuke had a dream that Madarame begged for food until Yusuke feeds him paint. Green, like Scheele’s green, the one made with arsenic. Or maybe yellow, like Van Gogh trying to dye his insides the color of sunlight and happiness. Yusuke uses metal chopsticks, stainless steel, long to keep it away from his fingers, and held Madarame’s jaw shut until he swallowed. Colored from the inside out, drowning in chemicals and toxic metals, the shift from Madarame’s body living and breathing to a large body wearing old clothes is easy and fast.

*

It would be better if Madarame died in the room full of the _Sayuri_ copies, Yusuke is thinking. Better backdrop. A disgraced artist, surrounded by his crimes. Would the _Sayuri_ want that? Without the baby in her arms, is she looking down tenderly at Madarame’s body as he breathes his last on the wooden floor under her?

No matter how long Yusuke looks at the _Sayuri_ , the treasure they took from Madarame’s heart has no opinion. She’s a canvas. When Yusuke drags his hand across her neck, the thin lining of pencil left over comes away on his thumb.

*

Yusuke had a dream that Madarame slit his stomach in the kitchen in shame, like a samurai of old. For some reason, the stomach and the lungs and the liver are all red, but all slightly different colors. Ever the dutiful and loyal student, Yusuke pulls the organs out of Madarame and arranges them on the table, slotting them together in order like puzzle pieces, until Madarame’s insides are recreated without Madarame himself. Yusuke works for hours, paying no mind to Madarame’s last breaths on the table beside him, peeling the bones from the inside of his abdomen and recreating them around the organs on the table; lifting the spine one vertebrae at a time, doing his best to thread the nerves in their original places. Yusuke is a very good artist. Given enough time, he is sure that he can remake Madarame from the inside out. Bloody ropes pulling bones this way and that, Yusuke thinks; the human body is just a series of levers and pulleys. He’s done his anatomy homework. He pulls out the kitchen knife.

*

Yusuke had a dream that Madarame’s heart changed and, in Madarame’s newfound guilt, he starved to death for thirty days. Yusuke had a dream that Yusuke sat by his side for every one, supplying him with water to keep him from dehydrating, wiping his brow. As Madarame shrank and his skin shriveled, he became afraid. Yusuke had a dream that Madarame begged for strength, knowing that he had to atone with death for what he’d done, but still too weak to do it. Yusuke had a dream that he’d held Madarame’s hand as Madarame sank into the futon, there every step of the way, and held him down until his body ceased to struggle. Madarame looked at peace. Serene, half covered by his blanket, head tilted down and away, the same slope of grace as the _Sayuri_ herself.

**Saturday, June 4 th  
0 Days Remaining to the Change of Heart  
LOVE**

There’s a thump along the wood floor.

Yusuke is wondering if his mother pounded the floor when she gasped for air. He is in the middle of making dinner for them, too small as per usual, and he stops, and listens carefully.

There’s no other noise.

“Sensei?” he calls.

Nothing.

Yusuke looks down at the tiny bowl of vegetables, the kitchen knife in his hand, then puts both on the counter next to the cutting board. Wipes his hands on a paper towel. “Sensei?” he says again.

When he opens the door, Madarame is shuddering. He looks lost. Like a child. A boy who’s woken up from a nightmare into a worst nightmare. A person who doesn’t understand anything, not himself, not the world around him, not how to begin to reconcile the two. Yusuke is still standing in the doorway looking in.

It’s freezing in here.

“Sensei?”

Tears are streaming down Madarame’s face. He does not respond.

Yusuke kneels at his side. “What’s wrong?” he asks, although he has a good guess what’s wrong; there just isn’t anything better to say. “Sensei?”

Madarame covers his face with his hands and weeps.

*

The tears don’t stop. Yusuke takes to giving him more water and tea just to keep him hydrated, but Madarame refuses them like a child. They move to the kitchen table, just to get him out of his room. Madarame barely speaks. Yusuke isn’t sure if this _is_ the change of heart, or if it’s some sort of transitional phase, or if it’s finally coming together just the day before the deadline. For some reason, Madarame doesn’t speak at all, just sobs and sobs and sobs, and Yusuke has to just sit there at the kitchen table, where he’s shared thousands of meals with this very man, and watch his teacher dissolve into a picture of wordless, senseless penitence.

It feels like the change of heart is close, but not all the way there. Yusuke’s best guess is that something is occurring, but not well enough that Madarame’s despondency and lack of function from the previous week has lifted. “Sensei, you should drink something,” Yusuke says to the man who killed his mother, and Madarame shakes his head. Yusuke takes a deep breath.

“I’m sorry, Yusuke,” says Madarame at last. Thin and reedy. An old man’s voice. “Oh, Yusuke. I’m so, so sorry…”

Yusuke’s eyes narrow. If this is the change of heart, for some reason, it’s extremely unsatisfying to know that Yusuke and the rest of the Thieves had to drag half of Madarame’s heart out of him just for the words _I’m sorry_.

“I don’t deserve you,” says Madarame’s weak voice. “I don’t deserve to live. Oh, Yusuke, if only you knew…”

Yusuke’s hands withdraw to his lap. For some reason, all he feels is irritation. Why does this look and feel like a daytime J-drama? Here he is, Madarame wallowing in misery. Penitence galore. And what does this fix? What does this solve? Who cares? All the apology in the world does not give Yusuke his teacher back.

“Sensei, you’re not feeling well,” says Yusuke, just like he would any other day.

Madarame shakes his head inconsolably.

“Perhaps you should go back to bed.”

“I’m sorry, Yusuke. Please, believe me. I’ll make it right.”

Yusuke does, actually. He certainly does believe he’s sorry, after all it took to pull the _Sayuri_ from Madarame’s shadow. “You’re not feeling well,” says Yusuke again. “You might have been ill this last week, Sensei. I’ve been taking care of you.”

Madarame bursts into fresh sobs. _Oh, the hysteria_ , Yusuke thinks, and feels his lips twist.

“Why don’t you go back to bed, and perhaps you’ll feel better?”

“I’m sorry,” Madarame says again and again. “I’ll make it right. I’m sorry. I’ll make it right.”

*

Yusuke has to go outside.

He puts Madarame back in his futon and goes outside. He sends an email to his homeroom teacher, telling her that he won’t be in for the rest of the afternoon—art show duties with Madarame, unfortunately. She’ll accept the excuse, Yusuke knows. He sends a text to the rest of the Thieves, telling them that Madarame has begun to stir, but when they ask, he suddenly doesn’t feel like responding.

 _Make it right_ , Madarame had said. Yusuke has to laugh. He does, actually, sitting outside in the cold summer sun, just laughing to himself outside his own house, looking up at the shack where he grew up. Ridiculous. _Ridiculous_. Make it right. It hadn’t been right from the beginning; that had been the whole point of the exercise, hadn’t it? Discovering that Madarame had always been a sham, leeching off the artistic talent of his students. That Yusuke’s childhood home had been built on the corpse of his own mother, buried not yet deep enough.

This wasn’t a situation where Madarame had made a mistake, and could set their lives back to course. The whole thing had been ripped up by the roots. There was no _right_ to go back to. It’d all been rot from the start.

Yusuke stares at the ground.

He is so cold.

*

ANN: Hey Yusuke!!

ANN: How’s things?

ANN: Yusuke?

ANN: …Yusuke?

*

He should have shot and killed Madarame’s shadow the second Madarame confessed to killing his mother.

*

Three minutes without air. Four days without water. Thirty days without food.

*

Madarame’s hand, brushing his hair away from his face. Putting everything in its place. On their way to attend the funeral of a boy Madarame had driven to suicide.

*

The sun has moved significantly by the time Yusuke stands, and as begun to dip below the city buildings. Yusuke looks one more time at the shack. He figures it must be his childhood home. He figures it must be the place where his fellow students had their dreams crushed, their lives stolen. He figures it must be the place his mother died. He is trying to see it for all those things, but the truth is, he doesn’t know what it looks like, anymore.

He goes inside.

The foyer is still dark. It lays in front of him with the straightforward lines of a theatre stage, all the floorboards in their places, the hallways leading inevitably to their conclusions. On the left, Yusuke’s room. On the right, Madarame’s.

“Sensei, I do think you should drink something,” says Yusuke the diligent student. He goes to the kitchen and gets a cup of water—not hot, just from the tap. He knocks, doesn’t wait for a response, pushes the door open. Madarame is not there.

“Sensei?” says Yusuke stupidly, like saying that will bring him back. He used to do that when he’d had a bad dream: _Sensei? Sensei?_ A trained animal with a vocabulary of one. He steps into the room fully, as if there were any corners or closest for Madarame to have disappeared to. “Sensei?”

Yusuke had been by the atelier's front door all this time. Short of climbing out of a window, Madarame has not left the atelier. Still holding the cup of water, Yusuke goes to his own room, finds it empty besides the typical disaster of his latest painting. From across the room, the _Sayuri_ smiles at him, her child in her arms but her smile still withholding its secrets.

The atelier is large enough to house several students at once, but it’s still sparse, and it doesn’t have many crevices to put a body. Yusuke goes to the back pantry through the kitchen, finds it empty. Back through the kitchen: There’s a few other rooms that used to belong to other students. All empty. Back through the kitchen, because Yusuke is an idiot and forgot to check the laundry room when he checked the pantry: The laundry room is full of laundry Yusuke should probably do, and no Madarame. Back through the kitchen because Yusuke is an even bigger idiot and didn’t check the bathroom when he checked the bedrooms: Also empty. Back through the kitchen—

The bowl of vegetables is still on the counter. So is the cutting board. The kitchen knife is gone.

Maybe it’s because Yusuke is Madarame’s student, and they have the same aesthetic tastes, in the end. Yusuke was always trained to find the same organization as Madarame. In comparison to, say, some of Madarame’s other students, Yusuke and Madarame both like art that makes sense, you see. Connections that loop back upon themselves form poetry in visuals. The locked door at the top of the stairs is open just a crack; Yusuke takes the stairs two at a time and wrenches it open without hesitation. The dozens of _Sayuris_ stare back at him, walling Madarame in at every side, watching the blade of the knife against Madarame’s wrist.

Yusuke realizes he’d still been holding the cup of water when he drops it.

“Sensei!”

Sensei looks up for just long enough. Yusuke seizes his wrist hard enough that Sensei yelps, drags it up into the air until the knife falls and skitters across the floor. Sensei’s face is twisted with despair. “Yusuke, please,” he begs, sobs spilling out of his lungs; Sensei’s shadow had said that, too, as Yusuke had dragged the _Sayuri_ away from him. “Please, let me make it right…”

“You can’t,” Yusuke hisses.

“Yusuke, you don’t know what I’ve done—my boy, I’m sorry, I’ve done everything wrong by you, please, just let me give you this, it’s all I can d—”

Yusuke seizes Sensei’s shoulders and shakes him hard. “Stop crying!”

Sensei stops crying. Loudly, at the very least.

“You can’t make it right,” Yusuke says. Slowly, he slides down until he’s on his knees in front of Sensei. Two artists in parallel. Sensei stares at him like he’s never seen Yusuke before. “I know what you did. And I don’t want your apology. And I don’t want your suicide.”

The _Sayuris_ watch them without interest. Without the child in their arms, they smile down at the knife on the floor.

“You know what I did?” Sensei asks.

Yusuke starts laughing.

Sensei clings to Yusuke’s shirt. His palms are clammy. Somehow, Sensei is colder than even Yusuke. “Please tell me what I should do,” Sensei begs. “What I’ve done to you… to your siblings, your fellow students… to your mother… What should I do, Yusuke? I’ll do anything. I’ll give anything. If I can ever make it right…”

“Anything?” Yusuke says.

“ _Anything_ ,” Sensei says pathetically. Desperate for guidance.

Yusuke picks up the knife. Puts it far away, out of both of their reach. Slowly, he pulls Sensei up, which is more difficult than it should be, because Sensei doesn’t seem to realize that Yusuke is trying to get him to stand. Sensei is sweating and shaking and covered in tears. He looks disgusting. Yusuke smooths his unwashed hair away from his face, tucking it back, and does not smile.

“I want you to eat dinner,” Yusuke says.

*

Yusuke is not a very good cook. He considers cooking an art in and of itself, but it’s not one that he’s had the time to invest in learning. For him, rice goes in the rice bowl, and you eat it with something else, and that’s usually just whatever he can scrounge up for cheap.

Today, he puts some vegetables and some sauces in a pan with butter. He stir-fries them lightly, until they’re soft on the outside but just hard enough on the inside to retain their crunch. He makes an entire pot of tea, and places it in front of Sensei with a pair of cups. He takes out the biggest bowl that they own, puts three scoops of rice on it, and covers it with as much stir-fry as he can. He gets another bowl. Does it again. Places these on the table, too. Hands Sensei a spoon and a pair of chopsticks. Sits in front of Sensei on the other end of the table.

Sensei looks at him with misery.

“I don’t deserve this,” says Sensei.

“Please eat, Sensei,” says Yusuke coldly. Like a death sentence.

Sensei doesn’t have a choice. Yusuke doesn’t give him one. Yusuke stares at him with—with some expression that Yusuke cannot put a name to—but Yusuke stares at Sensei until at last, he picks up the spoon. Puts it back down again, as if nauseous at the very thought of eating the food of the son of the woman he killed. There is a very thin red line against Sensei’s wrist, where the knife had begun to bite.

“Thank you for the food,” Sensei says.

And when Yusuke looks down at his own plate, he knows that despite everything Sensei tried to teach him over the years, Yusuke is still hideously, piteously weak.

*

When they’re done, Yusuke asks Sensei if he would like seconds. Sensei stares down at the table. A shell of a man. Truly, a work of art in some ways; it seems the Phantom Thieves have rearranged and recreated him from the inside out. Yusuke is unsure if this really is the Sensei he knew his whole life. “You would save the man who destroyed you,” says Sensei.

Mostly, Yusuke is thinking that Sensei needs to take a bath. This last week has been extremely gross in regards to bodily hygiene.

Sensei bows his head. Yusuke told him not to cry, so he doesn’t. “I will make this right, Yusuke,” he says.

“You can’t,” says Yusuke coldly.

“I’ll confess. I’ll explain everything. All your works will go back to being under your name. You’ll be free to be your own person, and follow your own art.”

Is that what Madarame thinks Yusuke wants? “Please do not forgive me,” says Madarame. “Not ever. You deserve to curse my name until I am dead and gone. You—” and Madarame shakes again, and Yusuke narrows his eyes, knowing that the tears are about to come, but Madarame seems to force it down on sheer force of will. “Yusuke, you will always be the best and greatest thing I’ve ever created.”

Yusuke is silent. He doesn't want to hear this.

“I had thought…” Madarame rests his face in his hand, one miserable eye hidden in his palm. “I had thought creation for the sake of love and joy to be a naïve dream for children, stamped out of me by the art industry. Only now do I realize…”

Yusuke doesn’t want to hear this, either.

“I know apology means nothing. If it suits you… if it brings you peace… do not remember me, Yusuke. Live the rest of your life as if I had never been.” Madarame covers both eyes. He is crying again, trying to hide it. “I hope… you take solace in the fact that I have accomplished nothing of value on this earth except you. One day, I will disappear leaving nothing behind but you. You, and you alone, are the culmination of my life’s work...”

At last, Yusuke looks away.

“I know, Sensei,” he says.

*

When the dishes have been cleared and washed, the pan cleaned and put away, Yusuke goes to get the dropped cup and kitchen knife from upstairs. The knife still has a thin line of red blood along its edge. He cleans that too, puts it back in the knife block.

He hopes he will not dream of the cognitive Yusuke, still trapped in his painting, palms pressed up against the canvas, staring at him with mute, wordless fury. The portrait is, at long last, looking back at its maker. Yusuke might be the most unbeautiful art to ever live. One day, Yusuke may grow so hideous and selfish and resentful of the very man who made him that he will mistake himself for human. Yusuke is Madarame’s legacy now: his last of his wretched students still standing, who made it here to look him in the eyes. Yusuke is the culmination. The last in a series. The end.

And Madarame gets to live.

Yusuke hopes that the cognitive Yusuke will forgive him, one day. But for now, he wishes that he could say, like Ann, _I wanted him to live because I wanted him to suffer_ , and Yusuke puts his head down on the kitchen table, closes his eyes, and tries not to look at what he's done.

**Sunday, June 5 th**  
**???**  
**???**

Instead of dreaming of cognitive Yusuke, Yusuke is sure that last night, he dreamed that he was loved. The press conference is today, so he is not drawing anything, let alone trying to salvage the memory of his dreams by putting it on the page. He is watching Madarame at the table, framed by the TV screen, his face neatly resized for viewing. The image is perfectly centered. The camera-man, evidently, understands the ratios of good framing. The lighting is tasteful, the table neatly dividing the picture at the lower-third mark, even Sensei's clothes are neatly coordinated with the colors behind him. Aesthetically, artistically, everything lines up with mathematical precision. All the ends tied and in their place. Madarame begging for forgiveness in a perfect square frame. For the first time, Yusuke looks at a work of art, and finds he doesn’t understand it at all.

**Author's Note:**

> [Thanks for reading.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8WRWno_c_W8)
> 
> twitter [@p5crimes](https://twitter.com/p5crimes)  
> tumblr [@akechicrimes](http://akechicrimes.tumblr.com)


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